Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Green Zone: Review Roundup

While the film hasn't exactly grabbed the attention of the populace, it certainly has grabbed my attention. Brought to us by Matt Damon, Paul Greengrass, and Brian Helgaland (three of my favorite people making films), my contention is that Green Zone is a liberal fantasy that revises and simplifies the historical reasons for entering the Iraq War turning Matt Damon's Chief Miller into a superhero finding out the truth.

While that's the view that I take out of the film, there are plenty other voices out there, and below are a few of the other voices that I found interesting.

Kansas City.Com: A positive review from Robert Butler

Excerpt: "The film is particularly good at capturing the disconnect of life in Baghdad’s protected Green Zone. In Saddam’s former palace, Washington interns in bikinis lounge poolside with beers, cradling automatic weapons and listening to pop music. A few blocks away American soldiers are fighting and dying.

This movie is so focused on plot and breathless action that the acting is incidental. Unlike the Oscar-winning “Hurt Locker, these characters haven’t time for a significant emotional arc — they’re too busy running and shooting.

Still, Kinnear is a despicable villain, and Damon is his usual charismatic self. Amy Ryan has a few good moments as a reporter whose sloppy pre-war reporting about WMDs paved the way for the conflict, and Khalid Abdalla (who was born in Scotland) is excellent as a Saddam-hating Iraq army veteran who teams up with Miller, serving as his translator and the film’s conscience.

Bottom line: “Green Zone” is high-octane speculative fiction with a political agenda. You can already hear Rush Limbaugh harrumphing.

Inland Empire Weekly: Amy Nicholson makes a case that the film isn't simplified but in actuality distilled

Excerpt: "Green Zone is as smart of a thriller as you’re going to see on the Iraq War. (At least, until 2060 when an as-yet-unborn Quentin Tarantino will make his War on Terror Inglourious Basterds.) Inspired by former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s first-hand account, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Green Zone distills—not simplifies—the clashing forces that dashed our chance of peace. (If, in fact, peace was ever even on the table.)...Green Zone is richer than Jason Bourne’s sweaty quest; though it’s a compressed fiction, it’s fair. Unlike GWB’s “With us or against us,” bluster, this doesn’t pretend that people are either good or bad. Everyone—even Naor’s deadly general—is self-righteously following their conscience. And consciences have consequences."

Excerpt: "Green Zone feels like a self-conscious relic of the previous decade and there's nothing to convince us of otherwise, particularly because it applies tired aesthetics to an impotent tirade about the American invasion of Iraq. At its best, the picture suggests an extraneous coda to the Greengrass-completed Bourne trilogy, without the benefit of its mystery, its forward momentum, or its looming implications."

Excerpt: "Reviewing the Rob Marshall film Memoirs of a Geisha, Roger Ebert wrote, “I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy Memoirs of a Geisha.” This is such a useful critical rule of thumb that there ought to be a shorthand way of referring to movies fitting that description. I don’t suppose we can call them Geisha movies. No, probably not.

Still, let the reader understand when I suggest that Green Zone is a Geisha movie, in the sense that the more you know about Iraq and movies, the less you will enjoy it. I don’t know a lot about Iraq, and even I know too much for this movie."